| Rank |
Title of Great Novel |
Year |
Author |
Religious Affiliation of Author |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
Don Quixote |
1605, 1630 |
Miguel de Cervantes |
Catholic |
| 2 |
War and Peace |
1869 |
Leo Tolstoy |
Russian Orthodox |
| 3 |
Ulysses |
1922 |
James Joyce |
Catholic (lapsed) |
| 4 |
In Search of Lost Time |
1913-27 |
Marcel Proust |
Jewish Catholic |
| 5 |
The Brothers Karamazov |
1880 |
Feodor Dostoevsky |
Russian Orthodox |
| 6 |
Moby-Dick |
1851 |
Herman Melville |
Transcendentalist |
| 7 |
Madame Bovary |
1857 |
Gustave Flaubert |
Catholic |
| 8 |
Middlemarch |
1871-72 |
George Eliot |
Anglican; agnostic |
| 9 |
The Magic Mountain |
1924 |
Thomas Mann |
Lutheran |
| 10 |
The Tale of Genji |
11th Century |
Murasaki Shikibu |
Buddhist/Shinto culture |
| 11 |
Emma |
1816 |
Jane Austen |
Anglican |
| 12 |
Bleak House |
1852-53 |
Charles Dickens |
Anglican |
| 13 |
Anna Karenina |
1877 |
Leo Tolstoy |
Russian Orthodox |
| 14 |
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
1884 |
Mark Twain |
Presbyterian |
| 15 |
Tom Jones |
1749 |
Henry Fielding |
|
| 16 |
Great Expectations |
1860-61 |
Charles Dickens |
Anglican |
| 17 |
Absalom, Absalom! |
1936 |
William Faulkner |
Presbyterian |
| 18 |
The Ambassadors |
1903 |
Henry James |
Anglican |
| 19 |
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
1967 |
Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Catholic |
| 20 |
The Great Gatsby |
1925 |
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Catholic |
| 21 |
To The Lighthouse |
1927 |
Virginia Woolf |
Neo-pagan |
| 22 |
Crime and Punishment |
1866 |
Feodor Dostoevsky |
Russian Orthodox |
| 23 |
The Sound and the Fury |
1929 |
William Faulkner |
Presbyterian |
| 24 |
Vanity Fair |
1847-48 |
William Makepeace Thackeray |
|
| 25 |
Invisible Man |
1952 |
Ralph Ellison |
|
| 26 |
Finnegans Wake |
1939 |
James Joyce |
Catholic (lapsed) |
| 27 |
The Man Without Qualities |
1930-43 |
Robert Musil |
Catholic |
| 28 |
Gravity's Rainbow |
1973 |
Thomas Pynchon |
Catholic; agnostic |
| 29 |
The Portrait of a Lady |
1881 |
Henry James |
Anglican |
| 30 |
Women in Love |
1920 |
D. H. Lawrence |
|
| 31 |
The Red and the Black |
1830 |
Stendhal |
Catholic |
| 32 |
Tristram Shandy |
1760-67 |
Laurence Sterne |
Anglican (Church of Ireland clergyman) |
| 33 |
Dead Souls |
1842 |
Nikolai Gogol |
Russian Orthodox |
| 34 |
Tess of the D'Urbervilles |
1891 |
Thomas Hardy |
|
| 35 |
Buddenbrooks |
1901 |
Thomas Mann |
Lutheran |
| 36 |
Le Pere Goriot |
1835 |
Honore de Balzac |
Catholic |
| 37 |
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
1916 |
James Joyce |
Catholic (lapsed) |
| 38 |
Wuthering Heights |
1847 |
Emily Bronte |
Anglican |
| 39 |
The Tin Drum |
1959 |
Gunter Grass |
Catholic |
| 40 |
Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable |
1951-53 |
Samuel Beckett |
Church of Ireland (Anglican) |
| 41 |
Pride and Prejudice |
1813 |
Jane Austen |
Anglican |
| 42 |
The Scarlet Letter |
1850 |
Nathaniel Hawthorne |
Transcendentalist |
| 43 |
Fathers and Sons |
1862 |
Ivan Turgenev |
Russian Orthodox; agnostic |
| 44 |
Nostromo |
1904 |
Joseph Conrad |
Catholic; atheist |
| 45 |
Beloved |
1987 |
Toni Morrison |
|
| 46 |
An American Tragedy |
1925 |
Theodore Dreiser |
Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science |
| 47 |
Lolita |
1955 |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Russian Orthodox |
| 48 |
The Golden Notebook |
1962 |
Doris Lessing |
|
| 49 |
Clarissa |
1747-48 |
Samuel Richardson |
|
| 50 |
Dream of the Red Chamber |
1791 |
Cao Xueqin |
|
| 51 |
The Trial |
1925 |
Franz Kafka |
Jewish |
| 52 |
Jane Eyre |
1847 |
Charlotte Bronte |
Anglican |
| 53 |
The Red Badge of Courage |
1895 |
Stephen Crane |
Methodist |
| 54 |
The Grapes of Wrath |
1939 |
John Steinbeck |
Episcopalian |
| 55 |
Petersburg |
1916/1922 |
Andrey Bely |
Russian Orthodox; Theosophy; Spiritualism |
| 56 |
Things Fall Apart |
1958 |
Chinue Achebe |
|
| 57 |
The Princess of Cleves |
1678 |
Madame de Lafayette |
|
| 58 |
The Stranger |
1942 |
Albert Camus |
Catholic; Existentialism |
| 59 |
My Antonia |
1918 |
Willa Cather |
Episcopalian |
| 60 |
The Counterfeiters |
1926 |
Andre Gide |
|
| 61 |
The Age of Innocence |
1920 |
Edith Wharton |
|
| 62 |
The Good Soldier |
1915 |
Ford Madox Ford |
Catholic; agnostic |
| 63 |
The Awakening |
1899 |
Kate Chopin |
Catholic |
| 64 |
A Passage to India |
1924 |
E. M. Forster |
|
| 65 |
Herzog |
1964 |
Saul Bellow |
Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist |
| 66 |
Germinal |
1855 |
Emile Zola |
Catholic |
| 67 |
Call It Sleep |
1934 |
Henry Roth |
Jewish |
| 68 |
U.S.A. Trilogy |
1930-38 |
John Dos Passos |
Catholic |
| 69 |
Hunger |
1890 |
Knut Hamsun |
|
| 70 |
Berlin Alexanderplatz |
1929 |
Alfred Doblin |
Catholic |
| 71 |
Cities of Salt |
1984-89 |
'Abd al-Rahman Munif |
|
| 72 |
The Death of Artemio Cruz |
1962 |
Carlos Fuentes |
Catholic |
| 73 |
A Farewell to Arms |
1929 |
Ernest Hemingway |
Catholic |
| 74 |
Brideshead Revisited |
1945 |
Evelyn Waugh |
Catholic |
| 75 |
The Last Chronicle of Barset |
1866-67 |
Anthony Trollope |
Anglican |
| 76 |
The Pickwick Papers |
1836-67 |
Charles Dickens |
Anglican |
| 77 |
Robinson Crusoe |
1719 |
Daniel Defoe |
Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian) |
| 78 |
The Sorrows of Young Werther |
1774 |
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
Deist |
| 79 |
Candide |
1759 |
Voltaire |
raised in Jansenism; later Deist |
| 80 |
Native Son |
1940 |
Richard Wright |
Seventh-day Adventist; Communist |
| 81 |
Under the Volcano |
1947 |
Malcolm Lowry |
Methodist; Anglican; agnostic |
| 82 |
Oblomov |
1859 |
Ivan Goncharov |
|
| 83 |
Their Eyes Were Watching God |
1937 |
Zora Neale Hurston |
|
| 84 |
Waverley |
1814 |
Sir Walter Scott |
Anglican |
| 85 |
Snow Country |
1937, 1948 |
Kawabata Yasunari |
|
| 86 |
Nineteen Eighty-Four |
1949 |
George Orwell |
Anglican |
| 87 |
The Betrothed |
1827, 1840 |
Alessandro Manzoni |
Catholic |
| 88 |
The Last of the Mohicans |
1826 |
James Fenimore Cooper |
Episcopalian |
| 89 |
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
1852 |
Harriet Beecher Stowe |
Episcopalian; Congregationalist |
| 90 |
Les Miserables |
1862 |
Victor Hugo |
Catholic |
| 91 |
On the Road |
1957 |
Jack Kerouac |
Catholic; Buddhism |
| 92 |
Frankenstein |
1818 |
Mary Shelley |
|
| 93 |
The Leopard |
1958 |
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa |
Catholic |
| 94 |
The Catcher in the Rye |
1951 |
J.D. Salinger |
Jewish Catholic; Scientologist |
| 95 |
The Woman in White |
1860 |
Wilkie Collins |
|
| 96 |
The Good Soldier Svejk |
1921-23 |
Jaroslav Hasek |
Catholic |
| 97 |
Dracula |
1897 |
Bram Stoker |
Church of Ireland (Anglican) |
| 98 |
The Three Musketeers |
1844 |
Alexandre Dumas |
agnostic; Catholic |
| 99 |
The Hound of Baskervilles |
1902 |
Arthur Conan Doyle |
Catholic; Spiritualist |
| 100 |
Gone with the Wind |
1936 |
Margaret Mitchell |
Catholic |
| Title |
Author |
Religious Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| The Adventures of Augie March |
Saul Bellow |
Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist |
| All the King's Men |
Robert Penn Warren |
|
| American Pastoral |
Philip Roth |
Jewish |
| An American Tragedy |
Theodore Dreiser |
Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science |
| Animal Farm |
George Orwell |
Anglican |
| Appointment in Samarra |
John O'Hara |
|
| Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret |
Judy Blume |
Jewish |
| The Assistant |
Bernard Malamud |
Jewish |
| At Swim-Two-Birds |
Flann O'Brien |
|
| Atonement |
Ian McEwan |
atheist |
| Beloved |
Toni Morrison |
|
| The Berlin Stories |
Christopher Isherwood |
Hindu (Vedanta Society) |
| The Big Sleep |
Raymond Chandler |
|
| The Blind Assassin |
Margaret Atwood |
Humanist |
| Blood Meridian |
Cormac McCarthy |
Catholic |
| Brideshead Revisited |
Evelyn Waugh |
Catholic |
| The Bridge of San Luis Rey |
Thornton Wilder |
Congregationalist |
| Call It Sleep |
Henry Roth |
Jewish |
| Catch-22 |
Joseph Heller |
Jewish |
| The Catcher in the Rye |
J.D. Salinger |
Jewish Catholic |
| A Clockwork Orange |
Anthony Burgess |
Catholic |
| The Confessions of Nat Turner |
William Styron |
|
| The Corrections |
Jonathan Franzen |
|
| The Crying of Lot 49 |
Thomas Pynchon |
Catholic; agnostic |
| A Dance to the Music of Time |
Anthony Powell |
|
| The Day of the Locust |
Nathanael West |
Jewish |
| Death Comes for the Archbishop |
Willa Cather |
Episcopalian |
| A Death in the Family |
James Agee |
Episcopalian |
| The Death of the Heart |
Elizabeth Bowen |
Church of Ireland (Anglican) |
| Deliverance |
James Dickey |
|
| Dog Soldiers |
Robert Stone |
|
| Falconer |
John Cheever |
|
| The French Lieutenant's Woman |
John Fowles |
Atheist |
| The Golden Notebook |
Doris Lessing |
|
| Go Tell it on the Mountain |
James Baldwin |
|
| Gone With the Wind |
Margaret Mitchell |
Catholic |
| The Grapes of Wrath |
John Steinbeck |
Episcopalian |
| Gravity's Rainbow |
Thomas Pynchon |
Catholic; agnostic |
| The Great Gatsby |
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Catholic |
| A Handful of Dust |
Evelyn Waugh |
Catholic |
| The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter |
Carson McCullers |
|
| The Heart of the Matter |
Graham Greene |
Catholic |
| Herzog |
Saul Bellow |
Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist |
| Housekeeping |
Marilynne Robinson |
|
| A House for Mr. Biswas |
V.S. Naipaul |
Hindu |
| I, Claudius |
Robert Graves |
occult |
| Infinite Jest |
David Foster Wallace |
|
| Invisible Man |
Ralph Ellison |
|
| Light in August |
William Faulkner |
Presbyterian |
| The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe |
C.S. Lewis |
Anglican |
| Lolita |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Russian Orthodox |
| Lord of the Flies |
William Golding |
|
| The Lord of the Rings |
J.R.R. Tolkien |
Catholic |
| Loving |
Henry Green |
|
| Lucky Jim |
Kingsley Amis |
|
| The Man Who Loved Children |
Christina Stead |
|
| Midnight's Children |
Salman Rushdie |
Islam (lapsed); atheist) |
| Money |
Martin Amis |
agnostic |
| The Moviegoer |
Walker Percy |
raised agnostic Presbyterian; Catholic convert |
| Mrs. Dalloway |
Virginia Woolf |
Neo-pagan |
| Naked Lunch |
William Burroughs |
|
| Native Son |
Richard Wright |
Seventh-day Adventist; Communist |
| Neuromancer |
William Gibson |
|
| Never Let Me Go |
Kazuo Ishiguro |
|
| 1984 |
George Orwell |
Anglican |
| On the Road |
Jack Kerouac |
Catholic; Buddhism |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest |
Ken Kesey |
|
| The Painted Bird |
Jerzy Kosinski |
Jewish |
| Pale Fire |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Russian Orthodox |
| A Passage to India |
E.M. Forster |
|
| Play It As It Lays |
Joan Didion |
|
| Portnoy's Complaint |
Philip Roth |
Jewish |
| Possession |
A.S. Byatt |
Quaker (lapsed) |
| The Power and the Glory |
Graham Greene |
Catholic |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
Muriel Spark |
Catholic |
| Rabbit, Run |
John Updike |
Lutheran |
| Ragtime |
E.L. Doctorow |
Jewish |
| The Recognitions |
William Gaddis |
|
| Red Harvest |
Dashiell Hammett |
|
| Revolutionary Road |
Richard Yates |
|
| The Sheltering Sky |
Paul Bowles |
|
| Slaughterhouse-Five |
Kurt Vonnegut |
Humanist |
| Snow Crash |
Neal Stephenson |
? |
| The Sot-Weed Factor |
John Barth |
|
| The Sound and the Fury |
William Faulkner |
Presbyterian |
| The Sportswriter |
Richard Ford |
|
| The Spy Who Came in From the Cold |
John le Carre |
|
| The Sun Also Rises |
Ernest Hemingway |
Catholic |
| Their Eyes Were Watching God |
Zora Neale Hurston |
|
| Things Fall Apart |
Chinua Achebe |
|
| To Kill a Mockingbird |
Harper Lee |
|
| To the Lighthouse |
Virginia Woolf |
Neo-pagan |
| Tropic of Cancer |
Henry Miller |
|
| Ubik |
Philip K. Dick |
Episcopalian |
| Under the Net |
Iris Murdoch |
|
| Under the Volcano |
Malcolm Lowry |
Methodist; Anglican; agnostic |
| Watchmen |
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons |
? |
| White Noise |
Don DeLillo |
Catholic |
| White Teeth |
Zadie Smith |
|
| Wide Sargasso Sea |
Jean Rhys |